


never far away

by sdwolfpup



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: A story about love, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Motherhood, Swimming, open swimming, which is swimming outdoors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:28:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26103466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sdwolfpup/pseuds/sdwolfpup
Summary: The water is where she goes to be with her mother.Four times Brienne swims alone, and one time she doesn't
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 130
Kudos: 313





	never far away

**Author's Note:**

> I was listening to Elbow's “Real Life (Angel)” one day and realized how much the song fit for Jaime and Brienne (I will never be over _you with the laugh that could bring down a tenement_ as a description for our fanon Brienne laugh). Then Jencat pointed out I should [watch the video](https://youtu.be/ZAQeq0XIu6g), too, because the woman in it is reminiscent of Brienne on Tarth, and the entire atmosphere of the video would make a fantastic JB AU. She was absolutely right. The entire story unfolded before me, and here we are. Title from the Elbow song. Thank you to BrynnMcK for her astute and tender beta, and forbiddenfantasies for her impassioned support and everything else.

**Tarth (Spring)**

The water is where she goes to be with her mother.

Brienne steps into the gently lapping lake's edge, and her toes curl instantly with the cold. It's spring, but the sun is still too weak to do more than melt the snow. In summer, this shore will be pleasant; for now it's cold enough that her body revolts as she forces herself in up to her knees and then her thighs. Every year she has to go farther out before the water covers her legs. When she was small, it had taken only a few brave steps – with her shrieking the entire time – before she'd reached her mother's arms.

“Hush,” her mother would say, the water clinging with cold fingers to Brienne's young waist. It had been no match for the warmth of her mother's embrace. “You can do it, and I'll hold you until you're ready to go.”

With a deep inhale, Brienne dives fully under the water and the shock of it forces the air from her body, as it does every time; a jet blast of bubbles expelled until her lungs are aching and she breaches the surface once more with a gasp. The cold is everywhere, sinking in through her skin with a bright, electric tingling. It feels as if she's finally awake.

Brienne prefers swimming in the mornings, the solitude and mist curling around her. It's a hike to get from the gravel lot to this tucked-away lake in the mountains of Tarth, but she's done it enough now that she's no longer afraid, and neither is her father.

He'd been furious the first time she'd escaped alone one Saturday morning from their grief-soaked home to immerse herself in the lake instead. Brienne knew he'd never have let her go on her own if she'd asked first, but her brother had been dead for a year and Brienne hadn't been swimming in all that time. Stuck on land so her father wouldn't weep, Brienne had felt cut off from her mother when she'd needed her most. It had been like losing both of them at once.

With easy strokes, Brienne cuts through the placid surface of the lake as she begins her swim straight across. The water is clear enough near the shore, but as she swims, the rocky bottom grows deeper and murky, until there is only darkness below and the gray expanse of the cloudy sky above, and Brienne drawing a powerful line across the middle.

When she is on land, Brienne hates how she looks. Her legs are too thick, her shoulders too broad. It's a struggle to find clothes that fit, so she mostly wears baggy men's clothes and keeps her pale, thin hair pulled into a ponytail so no one has to see how limp it is. Of course, then she can't hide her face behind it, either. But every time she tries, Brienne remembers her mother brushing her wet hair back along her head, her hands wrinkled from the swim.

“Let me see you,” her mother would say, and then she'd smile like Brienne's upturned face had been beautiful. Brienne supposes to her mother she was. The memory of it is enough that she can keep her head up when she's walking by herself down the halls of her high school, surrounded by people and still far more alone there than she ever is here.

Here, there are birds chirping in the distance, and though she almost never sees them, there are fish, too, and there is the embrace of the water that makes her think of her mother.

In the middle of the lake, Brienne pauses and rolls herself to float face-up and stare at the sky. It looks like it will rain on her hike back later, but she doesn't mind.

“Hi, mom,” she says to the air and the lake and the mountains standing tall and silent like her father does when they visit the graves. “I had a bad week.”

Brienne tells her mother everything: the boys that tugged at the skirt she wore on Senior Dress Up Day, the girls that made fun of her for trying, the teachers that never quite looked her way when she sat in the back of the classroom with red eyes. She lets her secrets reach up to the sky and then fall back to be tucked into the darkness of the lake. She feels lighter with each word and tear that slips down her cheeks. They're much warmer than the water, hot little trails that feel like a caress of fingers across her skin.

When Brienne was little and she would cry, her mother would take Brienne's face in her hands and wipe the tears just after they fell. “There now, little one,” she'd say, her face folding with tender concern. “Tell me what's wrong and we'll get through it together.” Brienne had missed that most in the days after her mother had died.

Brienne runs out of bad things to talk about eventually, and she goes quiet, inhaling the crisp morning air. “Next time I'll have good things to tell you,” she promises, mostly because school will be done in a couple of months and then Brienne's life can really begin. A bird flies overhead and at the edge of the lake there's a welcoming whistle from the family that waits for its return.

When Brienne dips back into the water to continue on her way, she can't feel the tacky track of her dried tears any longer. She swims the length of the lake out and back again and imagines she hears her mother's gentle encouragement in the splash of every stroke.

**Riverlands (Summer)**

It's taken Brienne a while to find a lake that's private enough and still only a few hours from Riverlands University. She has dedicated what little free time she has to exploration, learning the hills and valleys of the area until she knows them as well as those on her own body. It's far more populous here than Tarth, and all the lakes within easy distance are packed from morning to night in the summer. They're deserted in winter, but her troubles don't stop with the sunshine, and she needs to be alone in the water today.

This lake to the east of Hornvale isn't her favorite, and it's a long drive just to reach the trailhead, but the hour climb almost straight up to get to it is good for exercising out the rage that has been simmering all week. Brienne unzips her hoodie as she huffs and grunts and digs her walking stick into the dirt with more force than is entirely necessary. She imagines she's digging it into Jaime Lannister's face, and next time she thwoks it so hard into the ground the metal point at the end gets stuck.

“Typical,” she grumbles, pausing to yank it out and continue on her way. She uses less force after that, but she is no less angry by the time she's hiked out into the valley that cups the lake in its wide, grassy hands.

Brienne's stripping off clothes even as she walks, her one-piece bathing suit already on underneath. There are sandals tucked into her backpack for when she's done, to give her feet time to dry before she shoves them back into her boots. She'd learned that lesson the hard way, when she was a teenager. She's had to learn many difficult lessons on her own, and she's often wondered if it would have been different had her mother still been around. When Brienne reaches the shore she drops everything to the ground and fairly leaps into the lake, splashing water everywhere as it welcomes her in.

The water is not as shockingly cold as she wishes it was, but it steals some of her fury as she takes her first, long-armed strokes, and by the time she's a quarter of the way out, she's more settled. The water is brown, which had concerned her when she'd come here the first time. But testing it had let her put the environmental science degree she was earning to good use, and now Brienne swims without worry. The color is from the silt in the runoff that feeds the lake, and not from pollutants, as she'd feared. Brienne isn't sure how pollutants would have even gotten up here, but she'd worried about it nonetheless, which was the second thing Jaime Lannister had ever insulted her about.

The first, of course, had been her body.

“I didn't know linebackers took Organismal Physiology and Ecology,” he'd muttered when she'd sat down in front of him in class. She would have preferred to sit in back, but she'd been late that morning to swim out the nerves brought on by the start of a new semester, and by the time she'd arrived, that had been the only seat left.

Brienne had turned her head to frown at him over her shoulder, and his eyes had popped open in surprise.

“Gods, you're a woman,” he'd said, and that had been the end of any polite conversation between them.

The problem was Jaime Lannister was also an Environmental Sciences major, and they were in so many of the same classes that Brienne was starting to wonder if there were bets in the front office over how long she'd last before resorting to violence to shut him up.

If it hadn't been for her swimming, she may not have made it this long. He doesn't know how lucky he is.

It's a beautiful day and the sky is a clear blue lake above her, not a single cloud to mar its surface. Because of the distance from her dorms, it's later than she usually swims, and the air even at this elevation is already warm. It's more like swimming in a tepid bath than outdoors. Brienne doesn't like it as much – she misses the jolt of the cold water to remind her that she's alive – but Jaime Lannister has been as aggravating as jumping into ten freezing lakes this week, so a peaceful swim is probably for the best.

When she is halfway out she treads water, staring around at the flowers, their petals fluttering in the gentle breeze.

“Hi, mom,” she says. “I had a _terrible_ week. Because of him, again.”

Brienne complains at length about Jaime: the way he's interning at the same lab she is, how he's used his good looks to charm their professor into believing he's not a jerk, how he makes fun of her big hands on the small pipettes and thinks he's clever. He is there every time she turns around, sneering and picking at her. Their professor had given Brienne the most interesting experiment to oversee and Jaime has taken it as a personal insult, one that he blames _her_ for.

“He's jealous,” she says into the water, tasting the fine grit of silt on her lips. “I did better than him last semester and now he thinks we're in some sort of competition. He's not even focusing on lake ecology! He studies forests instead, and he still insists on harassing me.”

Jaime isn't cruel like the kids in high school had been or dismissive like the rest of the students in their major are, but he annoys her in an outsized manner regardless. It's because sometimes she finds him in the library late at night, staring in frustration down at his textbook, his hands tangled in his golden hair; because when his brother came to visit the lab earlier that summer, Jaime had been light and joking and kind in a way she'd never seen before; because after that first class where he'd called her a linebacker, as they'd been packing up their supplies, he'd leaned near and said, “What sport did you get your scholarship with?” and she'd snapped, “Swimming,” and he'd assessed her shoulders, her hips, her legs, and only replied, “You should do triathlons” before sauntering off.

Brienne starts swimming again, because she can already hear her mother's response, the same thing she'd say when Brienne was younger and would complain that Galladon was bothering her: “Did you tell him to stop before you came to me?”

And the thing is, she hasn't, not exactly – not the way her mother would coach her.

“Tell him: stop that, I don't like it,” her mother would say, her mouth wide and firm and serious. Brienne would try to shape her face in the same way as she repeated it back. “Then if he doesn't, you get help from someone you trust. Like me.” Her mother would smile encouragement, and Brienne would feel braver.

Brienne hasn't said anything to Jaime Lannister because his bristling edges are better than everyone else's soft indifference. Just like the bracing snow-melt lakes of Tarth are better than this mild bath near the Riverlands.

She swims for a long time, much longer than normal. The water is too uncomplicated, not nearly as distracting as she needs. If her mother were really here, Brienne imagines she would be dryly amused by Brienne's self-imposed predicament. She would hug her, at least, when Brienne finally drags herself back to land, and Brienne misses the feel of her mother's arms with every last inch of her tired body.

**Stormlands (Winter)**

Brienne is soaked to the skin and she's not even in the lake yet. Jaime had looked at her like she was a deranged creature when she'd left his hotel room in the pouring rain, but she'd told him she needed time to think and he'd let her go with a sad smile. He knows that she goes to swim when she goes away, and after asking once and her vehemently turning him down, he's never asked to go with her again. Even Jaime doesn't have a place in this part of her life.

She's glad it's raining because it means she can go to her favorite lake: a long, meandering body of water that fills with boats in the sun, and laps gray and choppy and empty in a storm. Brienne shrugs out of her rain jacket at the treeline, wraps her pants and shirts up in it and tucks the ball of clothing under the oddly-shaped rock she navigates by. She's shivering already, and it's a relief to walk with calloused feet over the stones along the lake floor into the welcoming embrace of the water. She's sore, the kind of pleasant ache she used to get after a swim meet, the kind she usually gets now from standing too long at a lab counter or from a long hike for her job. Today the ache is in new and unexpected places, from new and unexpected activities.

The water is rough, irritated by the storm, and she swims into it with effort. There will be no gentle floating today, no time for long pauses. It's all right with her; she wants to not think at all, no matter what she'd told Jaime. She wants to swim and she wants to talk to her mother – for real, in person – and since she can only do one of those, she does it relentlessly.

Brienne swims so long she's afraid for a minute she's not going to make it back to shallow water when her arms start giving out, and the fear that Jaime will think she's drowned herself on purpose when they find her body shoots enough adrenaline into her seizing muscles that she makes it, crawling, back to shore. She collapses onto the sharp rocks that haven't been smoothed with time, and the ache is all over now, head to toe and every muscle in between, and she can't pinpoint any longer the places she twinges because of what she'd done last night.

The rain has stopped at least, so as soon as she can move again she sits up on the odd-shaped rock and curls her knees against her chest and stares out at the water.

“Hi, mom,” she says quietly. “Jaime and I...” Brienne flushes and gnaws at her bottom lip, trapping a piece of skin between her teeth.

She knows how many sentences she has started lately with “Jaime and I,” whenever she talks about her day. Jaime is based out of King's Landing, doing work with the Kingswood Forest Service. Brienne is out of Grandview, part of a small team that oversees the health and development along the Grandison River as it flows out to the sea. There are mountains and trees and cities between them, but they talk every day, and every few weekends one of them finds a reason to visit the other. They're friends, now, deeper and more trusting than she would have dreamed when they were in college.

Or they had been, until last night.

“We, um, slept together,” she whispers into the air turned fresh after the rain.

 _Slept together_ does not in any way encompass what they'd done, but even though her mother isn't really here, Brienne still can't bring herself to say anything more direct than that. Jaime had come to visit as usual, they'd gone on a hike as the day turned from sunny to stormy, they'd had dinner at a restaurant near his hotel, and then things had started to shift to something still surreal.

“Come back to my room,” he'd said, smiling at her as he signed for his half of the meal.

“Why?” she'd asked, so oblivious in retrospect that here alone on the uncomfortable rock, her skin clammy and chilled, she blushes in embarrassment.

“Because I've missed you,” he'd said.

She had missed him, too, so they went.

He had been patient with her trembling nerves. Sitting near her on the bed, his hand covering hers in a way that was familiar and new at the same time. The rain against the window had been loud.

“Brienne,” he'd breathed. None of the antagonism of college, none of the easiness of friendship. It had been spoken with a heavy promise that had thrilled and terrified her.

She didn't say his name in return; she didn't have a chance to before they were kissing, and then they were gasping, and then they were crying out. She had felt the same blazing affirmation of life as the best of her swims had ever given her – doused in heat instead of cold, but alive and tingling all the same.

Afterward, she had laid her head on his sweaty chest and the mass of his body had supported her own, as easy and as sure as the water.

“Jaime,” she'd finally said, whispering it into the night, and he'd held her more tightly.

“We used protection,” she tells her mother. “No thanks to Dad on that one, by the way.”

Selwyn Tarth had not known what to do with a teenage daughter, or a college-aged daughter, or even an adult daughter. He'd tried, but the loss of his wife and then his son had been as much as his wide shoulders could bear, and so Brienne had only talked to him about swimming and homework to keep from weighing him down further. She has always taken the rest of her problems to the water, and though she talks to her mother, she knows she has truly only ever been alone.

“I wish you were here,” Brienne says, barely choking down the sob that's been drowning her heart for years. “I've never done this before, and I think I might love him, and I don't know what to do.”

She buries her face into her knees and cries and hates that all she has for comfort are her own arms wrapped tightly around her legs.

The wind blows across the lake, cold and persistent. It dries and tangles her hair, raises goosebumps along all her exposed skin, makes her curl into herself for warmth. Eventually, Brienne's tears end, as her mother always promised they would. When she lifts her head and stares through bleary eyes, everything is the same as it was, and, she realizes, so is she. So is Jaime. They have slept together – _had sex_ , she says, loud in her own head at least. She's no longer a virgin. But that is only an act, just like diving into a deep blue lake for the first time. She is the same, it is only her understanding of the world that is altered.

This morning when she'd woken, Jaime had already been staring at her.

“Hello,” he'd said, soft as a spring day. She'd wanted to gather him to her, but she'd run here instead. Unfair, she knows, and wiggles her toes against the rock, stretches her legs and arms out away from her body.

Everything is different, but they are the same two people they were yesterday. The idea of it soothes her churning heart.

“I'll talk to him,” she promises the wind. It feels curious now, not demanding, as it brushes her cheeks. Brienne's shivering, and she pulls her damp clothes out from the rock and begins to pull them on. Everything sticks to her, cold and unpleasant. Her shoes squelch as she hikes back. She's forgotten her sandals and she'll have the blisters to show for it. Socks and a warm shower first, she decides, but when she makes it to the small parking lot, Jaime's car is there, too. He gets out, and he has a thermos and a blanket and a hopeful light in his eyes.

Brienne shuffles to a stop. The ache has receded everywhere. “How did you know?” she asks, not mad, just stunningly, soul-shakingly surprised.

“It's your favorite lake,” he says with a shrug, like that's information anyone else in her life would know.

She clenches her body tighter to ease the trembling. “Why are you here?”

“I was worried about you, alone out here in the storm,” Jaime says. This time when she starts to cry, he pulls her into his arms.

**Winterfell (Spring)**

Even Brienne isn't driven enough to swim in the lakes in the North in the winter. So she waits through every long dreary day, swimming in the pool at the local gym and staring at the snow like it's her own personal enemy, until one day, winter is gone.

“Let's go,” she tells Jaime, and they do.

She's spent all winter warning him how much this means to her, how she's never taken anyone swimming with her before, how she doesn't expect him to join her the first time, she just wants to show him where she goes. Jaime can likely recite it word-for-word by now, but he doesn't, and that only makes her love him more. Brienne doesn't tell him that taking him to the water is like introducing him to her mom. She wants him to experience it for himself first, before she brings up _that_ particular wrinkle.

Jaime drives and Brienne watches the land change as they journey into the Wolfswood. It's still too cold to try any of the lakes at elevation and even the wood still has white patches of snow lingering in crevices and small valleys. They don't talk much; Jaime puts on music but she barely hears it. Outside the trees are increasing in number and height, until they're driving more in shadow than in sunlight.

Brienne wakes up grateful every morning that Jaime is there and not miles away in a different city anymore. They'd been in a long-distance relationship for nearly a year after their first time together, and then Brienne had gotten a job up north and Jaime had followed her a few months later. He'd planned only to stay with her for a few weeks while he found an apartment, and then he'd never left. Her life would be bereft without him there now.

He drums his fingers on the steering wheel as he takes the side road she points out to him, and he's peering up at the misty sky whenever it peeks through the trees.

“You're sure it won't be too cold?” he asks for the hundredth time.

“You don't have to swim, Jaime.”

“I'm not worried about me; you couldn't get me into that water.”

“I'm sure I could somehow,” she says, grinning at him, and it breaks the worried ice that's frozen his jaw into a tense line.

Jaime arches an eyebrow, his eyes never leaving the road even as his hand heads unerringly for her thigh. “I didn't bring my swimsuit, do you think that'd be a problem?”

“Not for _me_ ,” she says, and his laugh fills the car.

There's never been laughter on her past drives; she's never chatted quietly with someone on the hike out. Brienne had feared it would feel disrespectful, that breaking the solemnity she cherishes would ruin the experience. It is not ruined, it is changed, and though it feels awkward and new, it's not bad. Her mother would have been happy to hear her daughter's laughter as they wound through the knee-high grass to the lake.

Brienne's mother had loved to laugh when they were swimming. Usually it was just her and Brienne in the water, but sometimes they'd coax Galladon down, too, on sunny days, and inevitably it was their mother that started the splash fights.

Brienne and Jaime reach the shore, the mist a patchy blanket across the water's surface. There's a chill in the air, familiar and fresh at the same time. She sets her pack down and unzips her hoodie, feels Jaime watch her undress. When she glances at him he looks curious, and a little worried.

“You're not going to get hypothermia, right? Do I need to start a fire for when you come back?”

She cups his face in her hands and kisses him. “I'll be fine,” she assures him. “I've been doing this since I was very small.”

He grabs her hands before she can pull away, and presses his hot mouth to the inside of each wrist in turn. “I'll be right here,” he tells her.

Walking into the water is relief delivered by lightning bolt. It's strange to feel Jaime's eyes on her as she wades in, but even the laser intensity of his stare dissipates in the cold. Without looking back, she swims for the far shore, until she's standing knee-deep on the other side, breathing hard, her skin tingling as her blood rushes to warm her up. She turns to face Jaime and he raises his hand, waving it a little. Brienne waves back. This, too, is new, the presence of another human in her solitude. Like a rock dropped into the water, there are ripples moving outward from this one change, but they're gentle undulations at most. Small pushes that stir her life without tipping her overboard. He could have been a boulder, if he'd been more reckless and uncaring.

Brienne swims slowly back towards Jaime, pausing in the middle of the lake to tread water. When she looks at him he's got his neck craned, watching her with the fierce protectiveness he carries with him always. She's bigger than him, but he doesn't care. He sees her as precious, so he watches out for her. It is as simple and profound as that.

Jaime lifts his hand hesitantly, checking if she's alright. Brienne signals she is. She won't spend much time here today, but she needs a few moments at least.

In the north, the lakes are dark in the middle, the depths capable of hiding sea monsters in her imagination. There's no need to be afraid of monsters, with Jaime keeping vigil on the shore.

“Hi, mom,” she murmurs, pitched quiet enough she can barely hear herself over a woodpecker's staccato tapping in the nearby forest. Sound carries across the stretch of a lake, and this is not for Jaime to hear. “I brought Jaime with me. I don't think he'll swim, but he wants to know me. I think you'd like him. Dad does, most of the time, when Jaime reins in his sense of humor. You know how Dad is.” Jaime's rooting around in his backpack, so Brienne stays where she is a little longer, low in the water so it laps at her chin.

“He takes care of me, mom, and I think you'd love him for that. He would have loved you. He lost his mom, too, when he was young.” Brienne blinks back tears and stares up at the sky. It's cloudy, and the light is dim. Spring in the north is always haunted by winter's shadow.

She swims a while longer, steady laps through the silence. Jaime coughs and it crackles in the trees like a branch breaking, and the birds chirp in annoyance. The water slides over and around her; her feet kick in smooth, steady motion; the stretch and scoop of her arms is a meditation. Everything is the same, but it all feels different today, and it's not because Jaime is there.

The winter had been long, but not so long she shouldn't have been here months before this. In truth, she's barely made it to the lake since last spring. There hasn't been much to take to the water since then. Her life is bobbing along, upright and happy, and with Jaime and work and the friends that she is finally starting to make, she doesn't need to talk all her problems out to the sky and the lake any longer. She doesn't need to share her burdens with an intangible ghost.

Brienne has come to understand she's always carried her mother with her, in every step of her life. It had just seemed easier to hear her in the water rushing past than in the wind as she bicycled to work, or over the sound of Jaime's heartbeat against her palm. She had thought her whispered confessions were only out of love, but as she watches her hands moving like pale fish in the dark water, she realizes it was loneliness, and – as more paths unfolded for her – fear. That if she didn't keep taking her worries to her mother first, her love would have in some way diminished.

She had believed that letting go was an act of betrayal.

But Brienne remembers being small and held by her mother, staring at the lake stretching out wide and deep before them. She'd been reluctant to leave the safety of her mother's arms, but the water had called to her even then.

“It's all right, Brienne,” her mother had said, urging her on. “Go explore. I'll be right here if you need me.”

Brienne swims and swims and she thinks of her mother with her arms open equally wide to set Brienne free and welcome her back. Letting go isn't betrayal at all; it is love.

She pauses once more in the middle of the lake, looks up at the sky, at the trees and the birds and the man on the shore. “I think I'm ready,” she says, and she swims to where Jaime waits.

When the water delivers her to him, he looks up at her as she stands, water sluicing down her skin in a rush.

“Feel better?” he asks, an honest question.

“Yes,” she says, smiling down at him.

“Good. Then I have something I've been meaning to ask you.” He kneels in front of her and Brienne shivers. In Jaime's hand is a ring, on his tongue is a promise. She says yes.

The sun breaks free from between the clouds, light sparkling along the lake. It reminds her of her mother's smile when she watched Brienne leave her behind. Brienne hears her mother's joyful laughter all the way home.

**Tarth (Summer)**

“Just a few more steps,” Brienne says, holding her arms out to the curly-haired toddler just at the water's edge. “You're almost there, love.”

The little girl stares with real skepticism at the clear water, as though she's expecting a shark to leap from the lake and devour her. Brienne blames Jaime for that; he'd regaled their daughter with tales of pirates at sea last night, and at least one crew had been devoured by maneaters.

Aelinor had just as ferociously devoured the stories, begging for one more, and then another, until Brienne had stepped in and separated them, ignoring their matching pouts.

Their daughter is past two now, not swimming on her own but eager to run headlong into the sea nonetheless. Brienne could have waited, but she is keenly aware of the swift passage of time and she doesn't want to hold back. The air is hot and the lake is pleasant, and it's a perfect summer day to introduce Aelinor to the possibility while Jaime waits for them at home. But their daughter apparently prefers the crash and chaos of the ocean; the lake is too calm for this one. Brienne blames Jaime for that, too.

“Mama?” the girl asks, stretching her chubby arms towards Brienne. Tiny fingers wiggle and grasp at the air.

“That's right, another step and Mama will get you,” Brienne promises. “I'm right here.”

Aelinor loves the water, and that finally overrides whatever other hesitance has been keeping her back. She throws herself bodily forward, hurtling with the fearlessness and utter trust of the very young. Brienne catches her, of course, swoops her daughter into her arms and pulls her near before she goes face-first into the lake. It's not deep, and Brienne's far too close to let anything bad befall her, but there's a little flicker of worry anyway, impossible to ignore.

She finds herself wondering – as she has about everything since the moment she discovered she was pregnant – if her own mother had felt this way. Had she been proud and frightened both when Brienne had dog-paddled out on her own? Had she laid awake at night worrying what would become of the life of this little human put into her hands? Had she felt transformed by the bone-deep joy at seeing father and daughter with their heads bent together towards some mischief?

Brienne hopes so. Not for the first time, or likely the last, she wishes that her mother was there to answer all of Brienne's questions, to meet her granddaughter, to watch the way Selwyn melts whenever they visit. There is a new light in his face that Brienne can't remember seeing before. It had disappeared when her mother had died, and she doesn't remember much of her father before that. As a child, Brienne's whole world had been her mother, her father but an appendage to the towering presence that filled her heart. She'd loved her father, of course, loved when he swung her around, when he put her on his mountainous shoulders, loved the way his beard tickled when he kissed her goodnight. But he'd been like a cloud passing over the sun: noticeable, and gone again.

She's stopped wondering what her life would have been like if her mother had lived, because she thinks it would not have been much different. Her mother wouldn't have stopped the other kids from bullying her; she wouldn't have convinced Brienne to go to a different college, to not fall in love with Jaime. There would mostly have been more comfort when things were scary, and far more hugs, and Brienne vows to shower Aelinor with as much of both as her own daughter will stand. When Aelinor curls tightly against Brienne's side after she's been crying, with sweaty curls and flushed face, Brienne strokes her back and inhales her scent and quietly assures her daughter that she's there.

Aelinor's got the straps of Brienne's swimsuit in her tight little fists. She's strong already, hard-headed and bursting with energy. Life springing forth in her small, coiled body. Brienne loves her more than her heart can hold sometimes. She presses a kiss to her daughter's forehead and feels closer to her mother than ever.

The water wraps around them both, and holds on until they're ready to go.


End file.
